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I rised up to around 1.5g at one point, but the TP has killed me. Sold a few things for good prices (namely all the copper and jute I'd accumulated), but bought a LOT of high level crafting mats while they're cheap. 100%'ing zones seems to be a good way to get money and XP, as well as completing your daily achievements.

So I hit level 40 at the weekend and found that the 2nd tier training manual is priced at 1g.

At the time, I had about 30-40s and while I try to save money, I do have to buy replacement gear as I level and general travelling tends to eat into my finances.

Now I'm at level 42 and I have about 70s to my name, so it's not a huge problem and I'll get my first gold soon. However it did make me wonder if there was something I was doing wrong, or maybe the lack of a trading post for most of my levelling had an effect.

I'm just curious how others have found their income working out for them, particularly what they can afford at the key levels like 10, 40, 60 and how much they had at 80.

Had a gold at 30. Bought my first tier cultural armor set - level 35 - by 38 (2g88). Pre-bought the 40 book. Had 3g75 by 60, 2g went to the 60 book. Bought second tier cultural armor set - level 60 - by 72 (7g20). Currently have 7g. Third tier cultural armor set is a bit more daunting: 119g.

NalanoH. Wildmoon
Director of the Friends of Nalano PAC
Attorney at Lawl
"His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy." - Woody Allen

That made laugh to myself. I didn't even know such a thing existed in the game. Thanks for posting.

I blew 50s on the cattlepult bet when I was somewhere in my mid-20's, low 30s. I was really surprised at myself for being that stupid, but at the same time it was a learning experience because I didn't expect that to be an actual thing either.

As for my money situation, I would be so much better off if it wasn't for the TP and my compulsive need to level my crafting professions(despite never making anything I've actually used). Those fine materials are just absolutely killer when you need to buy 50 of each to hit the next tier of gear. It's almost impossible to level your crafting to be equal to your character level in terms of gear you produce. Or at least that's the case if you're leveling two professions at once; it might be different if you're only leveling one.

Just last night I blew about 70s on a whole bunch of new gear because, aside from my main weapon, all of my gear was at least 10 levels behind me and it was making level-appropriate areas feel like a slog. I just don't seem to get many drops that fit me, so most of it gets vendored or salvaged. Even my new TP gear isn't exactly fitting for me, but it's still better than what I was using. And the upside is that I'm sitting on about 25% magic find now, and from my short amount of time playing with it it's definitely helping.

As for making money, I usually salvage any light armors that I find because I need cloth for armorsmithing. I'll usually salvage medium armors too because leather is a bit tough to find otherwise and seems to sell fairly well on the TP. But any heavy armors or weapons I'll just straight sell because metal and wood are more than abundant. I haven't really had any armor or weapons worth selling on the TP yet, so most of my stuff has been vendored. I could probably make more money if I looked at the vendor prices of items before salvaging them, but I really haven't cared all that much as of late because it seems like any time I really need the money I have it.

One thing I've started doing is every time I'm in town doing my crafting/TP stuff I'll put almost all my cash into the bank and go back out into the wild with 5-6s on me. I've only recently started doing this, but in two deposits I've stored a total of 90s. And since it's in the bank it isn't staring at me every time I open my inventory window, tempting me to spend it. I just wish I had discovered the cash deposit in the bank earlier, but it's such a small bit down in the bottom corner of the window that I completely overlooked it, unlike how in GW1 it was a large portion of the bank screen and at the very top.

As for my money situation, I would be so much better off if it wasn't for the TP and my compulsive need to level my crafting professions(despite never making anything I've actually used). Those fine materials are just absolutely killer when you need to buy 50 of each to hit the next tier of gear. It's almost impossible to level your crafting to be equal to your character level in terms of gear you produce. Or at least that's the case if you're leveling two professions at once; it might be different if you're only leveling one.

I was feeling much the same until I realized yesterday that there are actually things I could make with my laboriously aquired crafting skills that sell on the TP for significantly more than their assorted component materials cost to buy on the TP. Cue an evening of trading, crafting and Top Chef-watching and my L35 warrior can now make the L55 stuff in weapon- and armorsmithing, has made herself a full set of L35 rares and carries 10g or so. I only stopped because the damned trading post went down again.

Even if you don't want to spend an evening or two playing Trading Hero - which is pretty understandable, a lot of people don't play games for the excitement and drama of refreshing your items on sale lists every 20 mins to make sure you've got the cheapest listing by 1c - you don't actually have to make stuff with fine materials to get the professions up. Look into the discovering the recipes for Sigils and Runes, they're generally made with 1 or 2 Rare crafting materials and a single ingot. Most of them wont sell all that well but the materials are (usually) cheap and they make getting past some troublesome tiers a lot simpler. Checking the TP to see what you can make that you can sell instantly at an okay price can also keep losses pretty manageable.

I was feeling much the same until I realized yesterday that there are actually things I could make with my laboriously aquired crafting skills that sell on the TP for significantly more than their assorted component materials cost to buy on the TP. Cue an evening of trading, crafting and Top Chef-watching and my L35 warrior can now make the L55 stuff in weapon- and armorsmithing, has made herself a full set of L35 rares and carries 10g or so. I only stopped because the damned trading post went down again.

Even if you don't want to spend an evening or two playing Trading Hero - which is pretty understandable, a lot of people don't play games for the excitement and drama of refreshing your items on sale lists every 20 mins to make sure you've got the cheapest listing by 1c - you don't actually have to make stuff with fine materials to get the professions up. Look into the discovering the recipes for Sigils and Runes, they're generally made with 1 or 2 Rare crafting materials and a single ingot. Most of them wont sell all that well but the materials are (usually) cheap and they make getting past some troublesome tiers a lot simpler. Checking the TP to see what you can make that you can sell instantly at an okay price can also keep losses pretty manageable.

Yeah, that's what I'm planning to do after I start to play again. I hope I'll make some money thanks to this plan. One thing - please don't lower prices by 1c, it's a terrible practice.

I get where you're coming from but with the way the trading post is designed that'd be extremely irrational of me. That little game of prisoner's dilemma is massively biased against cooperation, far too many actors that would need to agree and betrayal is way too profitable for a cartel to ever be stable if one somehow formed. You do the minimal undercut or you settle for shifting maybe 1/10th the volume.

This also ensures that if you want to move a decent volume of goods you need to be online and paying some modicum of attention to current prices, which is probably a good thing.

Chances are it'd also be a race to the bottom. Unless the item has extremely heavy demand (like jute or copper right now), all it means is that you'll hit vendor price. Just look at the ridiculous depreciation of Black Lion chests.

Chances are it'd also be a race to the bottom. Unless the item has extremely heavy demand (like jute or copper right now), all it means is that you'll hit vendor price. Just look at the ridiculous depreciation of Black Lion chests.

The difference between the vendor price for what I craft and what I ask when listing it is usually somewhere between 30s and 40s. I'm reasonably confident the significant increase in trade volume a minimal undercut gives me far outstrips the minimal additional impact I have on the average price of my goods.

[E:] Also, re: black lion chests, the reason they deprecated is because they're useless items without keys and keys are rare and expensive. The chest supply outstrips the chest demand by a couple of orders of magnitude, of course they're going to sell at vendor price once people figure that out.

The following is not directed at anyone in particular, but at the community in general.
<rant>
I'm okay with maybe lowering the price by 1c, if necessary (Although all my stuff sold within 5 minutes when listing at current price, without undercutting), but PLEASE, for the LOVE OF GOD, don't undercut by 50c like some people. That has totally broken the prices on almost everything I produce, the stuff sells for 4s under production price (on a 6s item), because people think materials they found are free. They are not free, they have their sale value on TP, so don't be stupid and make yourself loose 4s for no good reason.
</rant>
Sorry, old emotions from trading in Eve Online are stirred up again. I should probably stay away from serious trading for now.

That has totally broken the prices on almost everything I produce, the stuff sells for 4s under production price (on a 6s item), because people think materials they found are free.

I'm not saying this doesn't happen and some goods certainly would sell in the same amounts at higher prices, but the main reason stuff sells for under material cost isn't that players don't value materials correctly (whatever that is). The materials don't just produce an item: they can produce an item, trade skill exp and regular exp. Players will happily trade some money for the xp gains and, most annoyingly when you start out, many players who are behind on skills or are leveling skills alts and will value money on the level 80 scale.

This basically means that as the game matures you should expect every single craftable item not requiring maximum skill to end up priced below the cost of its materials, since the crafters will be perfectly willing to pay money for skill points. Right now this is only true at the bottom tier and there are still some profitable recipes around on the way up: these are temporary and all you can do make as much use of them as you can while they're still around. They will disappear and that isn't avoidable or somehow wrong.

If you go in expecting the crafting economics here to behave in anything like the real world - or anything like a game like Eve - then you will be disappointed.

If you go in expecting the crafting economics here to behave in anything like the real world - or anything like a game like Eve - then you will be disappointed.

Yeah, I had already figured as much (According to the GW Wiki, there are detailed stats about price and amount of items moved for each individual item, but I can't find them, and without that, you can pretty much forget any serious trading anyways). It just makes be a bit sad that it has to be that way, since there is the potential to get at least some form of halfway decent economy with the possibility for trading going. But we'll see how it turns out, maybe it all improves after a time, once ANet has fixed the worst problems and can focus on improvements instead of fixes.

More kinds of grind? How so? All I see in here is people talking about the same kinds of stuff that they'll talk about for every MMO. Namely, how to make in-game money effectively. I don't see any new kinds of grinding, unless you're talking about the discussion on how to maximize your TP profits. But that's a completely avoidable thing because you don't have to worry about following trends in the market if you don't want to. You can instead just pick to sell items at whatever the highest buy order is placed at, or to match the lowest current sell order if a buy order isn't available.

You can completely skip crafting if you want to and still make money by gathering materials since, unlike pretty much every other MMO, they don't require specific skills to gather and only rely on you having their particular gathering implement equipped. And crafting is about the only kind of real grind that I've seen mentioned here. And it's a grind in every MMO that it's in, so it's hardly a new concept.

People interested in creating a collaborative spreadsheet to track prices on the TP and enable us to play the market to an extend? Basically just a matter of noting down highest buyer/highest seller and the date over a set time and watching the fluctuation. With some spreadsheet magic this could have fancy colors, automation and whatnot.

People interested in creating a collaborative spreadsheet to track prices on the TP and enable us to play the market to an extend? Basically just a matter of noting down highest buyer/highest seller and the date over a set time and watching the fluctuation. With some spreadsheet magic this could have fancy colors, automation and whatnot.

That would be very interesting indeed. If a site already does this, even better.

Some more insight from yesterday's Trading Post salesman extravaganza: Aside from selling rare items, it is also worthwhile to check prices for green gear on the Trading Post. I regularly sold my unneeded green and yellow stuff (see below) for a few silver above what I would have gotten from the vendor (and in the game).

When it comes to selling rare items of level 70+, you should never ever sell them below the going price for globs of ectoplasm. I see orders of 10-20 items coming from one buyer at around 20 silver (yesterday's price for ectos). In general, I get suspicious if I see a low number of people looking for larger quantities of the same gear item.

My lesson of the day: Large scale (hah!) events, like Dragon bosses, can earn you tons of loot, especially rare items from chests.